Review of Manilla – Free Bill and Account Organization

Update: Manilla has announced they are closing down as of June 30, 2014. This is unfortunate, as they offered a wonderful tool!

Are you still managing your finances with paper statements and paper checks? Each month you receive a handful of account statements from various service providers, grab your checkbook and stamps, get the checks sent out via snail mail, and file your old statements for many years just in case you ever need them.

Oh, and you have to monitor your bank accounts to make sure your checks actually arrived at the payment processing center lest you end up with a non-payment penalty.

Manilla.com is a better way of managing through this statement, payment, and storage process that gives you all of your data at your fingertips.

Oh, and it’s free.

Intrigued?

What Exactly is Manilla?

Manilla is a free web service that lets you monitor a variety of your service provider accounts from one easy interface. This is not a budgeting and money management tool. Instead, Manilla helps you both track your current statements and store your old account statements. It removes the hassle from having to remember multiple website logins as well as having to remember to physically or digitally store your statements. Manilla does all of this automatically.

Free Easy Sign Up with Manilla

Signing up with Manilla is easy. Just open an account with some basic details and start adding all of your accounts to the Manilla interface.

When you click on an individual service provider you can see the latest statement and have the option to setup payment of the bill. (Note: Bill pay doesn’t work with every service provider. Sometimes when you click the link it takes you to your provider’s website where you have to manually pay the bill.)

Online deal websites like LivingSocial and Groupon (this is the only online tool I’ve seen that tracks your Daily Deals Coupons in one place!)

You could save yourself a ton of clicks and waiting on websites to load thanks to Manilla’s single login interface.

How Can Manilla Be Free?

The company has partnerships with thousands of service providers that save money on postage and printing of account statements. Those firms pay Manilla so you don’t have to. This is a free service to consumers that also helps reduce costs for companies. It’s a great win-win.

Store and View Account Statements

Whenever you receive a bill, you receive notification and can view it in your Manilla account. Additionally your statements are automatically stored. No more needing to manually download your statements or having a huge filing cabinet with all of your paper documents. You are also able to store your documents indefinitely, a big advantage as many financial institutions limit online document storage to one or two years. If you ever decide to close your account, you have 30 days to download your documents before they will be deleted.

Bank Level Security

Any time you are dealing with account information, you want to ensure that your information is secure, and Manilla has you covered. Manilla secures your login information, documents, and personal data with bank level security. Your information is encrypted and stored in secure data facilities with 24/7 security and biometric controls. Here is an overview of their security setup.

Manilla vs. Mint Comparison

Some may compare Manilla with another immensely popular personal finance tool, Mint.

However, I think this comparison is flawed. Manilla is about helping your track and store your statements. (One would assume bill pay will be a lot better in the future.)

On the other hand, Mint is more about tracking every single cent that you spend and comparing it to a budget that the company helps you setup. Mint has more neat charts and graphs as well. Manilla isn’t about tracking every cent, it’s about automating an annoying process and being able to view everything with a single click.

More Reasons to Give Manilla a Try

Manillaalso offers apps for the iPhone and Android, making this easy to use on the go. This is especially helpful for Daily Deals coupons, which are often used while away from your main computer.

Manilla is also great when you need to reference old statements. You can quickly find what you are looking for in your Manilla account instead of searching through your filing cabinet or trying to remember dozens of login names and passwords.

Kevin is a debt reduction champion with a passion for teaching people how to budget and build wealth for retirement. He’s building a personal finance freelance writing career and has written for RothIRA.com, Good Financial Cents, Moolanomy, and many others.

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